Monthly Archives: August 2013

| Photos, TV

Photos: Inside the Breakfast Television studio

The Breakfast Television studio is 2800 square feet, and very versatile

The Breakfast Television studio is 2800 square feet, and very versatile

City Montreal finally launches its flagship show Breakfast Television on Monday. This week, I was among those invited to the new studio in the Rogers building on McGill College Ave. to take a peek.

(I also spoke to Executive Producer Bob Babinski for a feature story that appears in Saturday’s Gazette about the state of morning TV in Montreal.)

I was quite surprised by its size of 2800 square feet. It certainly doesn’t look like the kind of thing you’d find on the 8th floor of an office building, and its impressiveness even gives CTV Montreal’s new studio a run for its money.

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| TV

CBC expands Sunday local newscasts starting Sept. 1

You'll be seeing more of Thomas Daigle soon

You’ll be seeing more of Thomas Daigle soon

Few people really paid attention to it when the CBC’s broadcasting licences were renewed this spring, but the public broadcaster committed to expanding local programming in large markets like Montreal, going up to 14 hours a week and ensuring at least one of those hours was non-news local programming.

Currently, large-market CBC television stations produce 10 hours and 40 minutes a week of local news: Three back-to-back half-hour newscasts starting at 5pm weekdays, a half-hour late newscast at 11pm weekdays, a half-hour newscast at 6pm Saturdays, and a 10-minute newscast at 11pm Sundays. (Vancouver is an exception, its Sunday newscast is already half an hour.)

The new CBC licences take effect Sept. 1, so with less than two weeks to go I was wondering why we hadn’t heard any announcements about new shows yet. Had they forgotten? Would they not make the deadline?

Chris Ball, senior manager of media relations for CBC English Services, said they will be meeting the 14-hour-a-week requirement as of Sept. 1 as promised. The Sunday newscast will be expanded to 30 minutes from 10, giving us 11 hours a week of local news. The rest will be made through “the addition of one hour of local non-news programming that will run Saturday, Sunday and Monday in those markets.”

He was deliberately vague about that part. “Planning is still under-way and we’ll have more details to share in the coming weeks,” he said.

The electronic schedule for CBC Montreal, shows that, for Sept. 1 and 2, the station will be re-airing the first episode of the Absolutely Quebec series at 11am. (The same thing is being done at the other affected stations: Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa.) The condition of licence doesn’t specify that the local programming be original, so repeats are still within the rules, and gives the corporation a cushion until it puts something else on the air.

What form this non-news programming will take, whether it will be one program repeated twice or three separate ones, is unclear at this point. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Until then, enjoy the Absolutely Quebec reruns.

| TV

Colbert Report’s time on CTV comes to an end: “exclusive to Comedy”

I remember when the Colbert Report first launched in 2005. I remember the three weeks between the time it debuted on Comedy Central in the U.S. and the time that CTV began airing it in Canada. I remember the handoffs between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which got viewers of the first show to tune in to the second.

But after eight long and truthy years, the Colbert Report aired its final new episode on CTV on Aug. 15. When it comes back from vacation in September, CTV will have replaced Colbert at 12:35am with Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, a move being made in anticipation of the replacement of Fallon with SNL’s Seth Meyers in early 2014.

Stewart is staying on CTV, as is Conan O’Brien, whose show gets pushed back by half an hour. The new schedules, as of Sept. 2, will look like this:

  • CTV: National news at 11pm, local news at 11:30pm, Daily Show at 12:05am, Late Night at 12:35am, Conan at 1:35am, a Comedy Now! rerun at 2:05am, and then infomercials
  • CTV Two: Local news at 11pm, Tonight Show at 11:35pm, Criminal Minds rerun at 12:35am, then infomercials
  • Comedy Network: Daily Show at 11pm, Colbert Report at 11:30pm, Conan at midnight

The move makes sense for Bell Media for two main reasons:

  • Simultaneous substitution: Airing Late Night instead of Colbert means that CTV can take over NBC’s signal for that hour each night and insert its own ads. Because Comedy Central isn’t available in Canada, there’s nothing to substitute with Colbert (which airs at a different time anyway). It’s the same reason why NFL games air on CTV but CFL games air on TSN. The system favours airing U.S. network programs on broadcast channels.
  • Must-have programming on Comedy: With Colbert being “exclusive to Comedy”, a fact that CTV isn’t hiding (it even bragged about that during ads shown to the audience at Just for Laughs galas this summer), fans of the show must subscribe to that channel to get it. I suspect most fans already subscribe to that channel, but this is even further incentive. And specialty channels are where the big money lies in television right now.

There are other bonuses too. Colbert no longer airing on CTV might push more cable distributors to offer Comedy in high definition (Videotron, for example, currently doesn’t, which means Videotron subscribers won’t be able to watch the show in high definition anymore.)

Of course, the wishes of viewers aren’t really factored in here. Given the choice, they would probably prefer the existing system, seeing Stewart and Colbert on CTV and having the option to watch classic late-night on NBC. But when the wishes of the viewers conflict with the ability to game the system for more profits…

| Montreal, TV

New ethnic TV station ICI begins over-the-air transmission

Test signal currently being transmitted by CFHD-DT (ICI) on Channel 47.1

Test signal currently being transmitted by CFHD-DT (ICI) on Channel 47.1

Montreal’s tenth over-the-air television station has begun transmitting.

CFHD-DT, which wants to operate under the brand International Channel/Canal International (ICI) but is in some legal trouble with Radio-Canada over that, announced via its Facebook page and its Twitter account that it was on the air as part of its testing phase and would be airing promotional videos soon.

The 5,500-watt signal, broadcasting from a Bell-owned tower near the police station on Remembrance Rd., is showing a partially blurred time-lapse cityscape video, with the callsign, an email address and the station’s logo at the bottom. The signal has no audio.

The station is broadcasting on Channel 47.1 in 1080i high definition.

Station manager Sam Norouzi, who has been very busy the past few weeks, tells me that the station should launch some time near the end of September or early October. Part of the delay is because he needs to coordinate with cable providers Videotron and Bell (Fibe) to ensure carriage on their systems. Because it’s an over-the-air channel, ICI will be carried on both cable systems’ basic packages, without a per-subscriber fee.

Norouzi said there hasn’t yet been discussions with satellite TV services or out-of-market cable systems about carriage, so the station will launch without carriage on those systems at first.

When it does air, ICI will carry programming in 15 languages for 18 ethnic groups, with most of its programs produced by independent groups that purchase airtime and sell their own advertising. He said his family’s production company Mi-Cam Communications, as well as independent producers he’s working with, have hired a lot of freelance camera operators who have been busy shooting footage (including the recent Montreal Italian Week), and “the team is growing every day.”

“It blows my mind the quality of the stuff we’re shooting,” he said. Unlike the kind of stuff seen on CJNT during the Canwest days, programming on ICI will be in high-definition, and have superior technical quality, he said.

ICI is being helped through financial, technical and other assistance from Channel Zero and Rogers, who offered it so that the CRTC would approve Rogers’s purchase of CJNT and its conversion into an English-language station that’s now part of the City network. Rogers is giving the station more than $1 million in funding for programming, and Channel Zero, in addition to providing free master control services for five years, has offered to loan up to $1 million to the station.

Rogers also offered up to 200 hours a year of free programming from OMNI, its ethnic network. Norouzi said at first he didn’t think he’d be using much OMNI programming. Now he says he’s looking at adding three programs from OMNI (but not the daily newscasts).

Norouzi said much of the past few weeks have been spent on technical aspects, including installing the antenna (and having to fix it after it was accidentally dropped and broken during installation). “I’m going to write a book eventually about all the adventure,” he said jokingly.

“In the past two weeks, things have progressed very rapidly.”

| TV

CRTC dismisses complaints against Explora, Illico Club Unlimited over genre exclusivity violations

Genre exclusivity, one of those dinosaurs of the Canadian broadcasting system, was put to the test recently thanks to two complaints from companies that profit from this protection, and on Tuesday the CRTC rejected both complaints.

Background

Basically, any specialty TV channel is prevented from competing directly with any channel that has genre protection as part of its licence. This is to ensure diversity in the specialty channel system by protecting services that have been broadcasting for decades and have high requirements for Canadian content and original programming.

The list of services with such genre exclusivity is relatively small compared to the number of channels available today. All were licensed in 2000 or before, because the CRTC has said it will no longer grant these types of licences (for now anyway, it plans to revisit this in 2015-16). They include the oldest and most popular specialty services: Discovery Channel, Bravo, Food Network, HGTV, Showcase, Space, Comedy Network, Teletoon, Weather Network, Vision TV and YTV, but many others too in English, French and other languages.

Most TV channels licensed since 2000 are called Category B (formerly Category 2) licences, which do not have genre protection, which means they can compete freely with each other (but not directly with the genre-exclusive Category A services).

Genre exclusivity doesn’t mean that two channels can’t air the same programs. If a program falls under two channels’ nature of service (say, it’s a sci-fi show for kids), then it can air on both. But it does mean that two channels can’t be about the same thing.

In many cases, genre exclusivity is enforced by licence limitations. The Comedy Network, for example, is limited in how much animated programming it can air to prevent it from competing with Teletoon. Most new channels are limited in how much of their schedule can be spent airing theatrical films, live sporting events or music videos.

Specialty channels are not considered to be directly competing if they serve a niche. For example, CMT doesn’t compete with MuchMusic because it (theoretically) airs country music videos and country-themed programming. Retro programming channels like Comedy Gold or MovieTime are allowed because their licences state that they can only air programming that’s at least a certain number of years old.

But the system has a bunch of flaws. For one thing, many channels that have genre exclusivity have been moving away from the formats they were licensed for. MuchMusic has been pushing to reduce the number of hours it devotes to music videos. Discovery Channel’s commitment to science, nature and technology can certainly be questioned these days as reality shows start filling up its schedule. What is now called Twist TV was licensed as a health channel, and now airs Bridezillas and Supernanny. And don’t get me started on OWN (which, as far as I can tell, has completely ignored a court order from the CRTC requiring it to air educational programming).

The CRTC is slowly starting to deal with this issue. First was the moratorium on new channels of this protected type. Then came the removal of exclusivity for mainstream news and sports channels, which created a new category (Category C) of channels that have common licence conditions and are designed to be directly competitive. The commission recently proposed putting mainstream music channels (like MuchMusic and MusiquePlus) into this category as well, though a decision has not been reached yet.

The commission’s three-year plan has it reviewing genre protection in 2014-15, and then reviewing the Category A system the following year to see if it should remove the moratorium and licence new services of that type.

In the meantime, the CRTC has to enforce this, particularly when there are complaints, which brings us to the news of the day.

The news

The CRTC released two decisions on Tuesday:

The first dismissed a complaint by Serdy Media, which owns Canal Évasion. Serdy had complained that Radio-Canada’s new service Explora violated Évasion’s genre protection by broadcasting “adventure”-themed programming, while Explora’s licence requires it to broadcast programs related to “scientific discoveries, the environment, nature and human health.” Serdy took specific issue with the fact that Explora marketed its programming in part as adventure. The CRTC found that because the programs in question could also be categorized as environment or nature programming, Explora was still within its licence. The commission dismissed the complaint, but warned Radio-Canada not to use “adventure” in marketing the channel.

The second decision dismissed a complaint by what was then still Astral Media, which owned pay TV movie service Super Écran, against Videotron’s Illico Club Unlimited. Videotron launched the Netflix-like service earlier this year, and though online streaming services are not regulated by the CRTC, because Illico’s programming could be accessed through Videotron’s video on demand system, which is regulated by the CRTC, Astral complained that it was essentially a VOD service and had to respect genre protection. The CRTC essentially ruled that because Illico Club Unlimited contains films that are past the pay TV window, and doesn’t include movies currently airing on Super Écran, it’s not directly competitive.

Both decisions limit the reach of genre protection, and you have to wonder if this isn’t a way of relaxing the rules a bit to allow for more competition.

Unfortunately we’re still going to have to wait another year before this system gets the full airing out it deserves, and these entertainment-focused channels with profit margins in excess of 30% are forced to justify their protection from direct competition.

| Radio

Hudson FM station ready to start “within weeks”

Existing (orange line) and proposed (red line) pattern of CHSV-FM 106.7 Hudson

Existing (orange lines) and proposed (red lines) patterns of CHSV-FM 106.7 Hudson, with interference zones from 106.9 The Bear (blue) and 106.7 The Wizard (red).

The western off-island communities of Hudson, Saint-Lazare and Vaudreuil could see their first English-language local station later this fall if the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission approves a technical amendment so the station can change its transmission site.

Transmission Plan B

Dufferin Communications, which has a licence to operate a 500-watt English-language music station at 106.7 FM serving the region, was originally supposed to transmit from a Bell-owned tower on Route Harwood near Rue Thomas, which would have put it right in the Hudson community. But on April 29, Bell informed Dufferin that “the tower is now at its capacity and any additions will cause overload and reinforcement will be inevitable.” It also says that the location on the tower that Dufferin had been looking at originally has now been taken by an antenna being used “for public safety purposes.”

Rather than spend as much as $100,000 to reinforce the Bell tower, $50,000 to install a tower extension, and $40,000 to install a new transmitter shelter, Dufferin decided it would seek another tower nearby. Its search led it to a Rogers-owned tower on Chemin Sainte-Angélique near Rue des Liserons, about 5.3 kilometres southwest of the Bell tower.

Because it’s much farther from Hudson than the Bell tower, Dufferin is also seeking changes to the station’s pattern to compensate. Rather than an omnidirectional antenna at 500 watts, they would operate a (slightly) directional antenna with an average of 1420W and a maximum of 2650W. (Both the approved and proposed antennas would be at a height of 95 metres.)

“In order to maintain the 70 dBu contour in the same position over the target area of Hudson/St-Lazare, and in order to compensate for some minor terrain grazing, it is necessary to increase power to 2650 watts,” its brief to the CRTC says.

The new signal keeps about the same coverage in Hudson, but significantly improves the quality of the signal toward the west (Rigaud) and a bit toward the south (Saint-Clet). The larger 54dBu contour improves in all directions (more so toward the west), but the signal’s actual reach will mainly be limited by interference from other stations. Toward the east and south, people in the West Island, Mirabel, Beauharnois and Valleyfield will likely experience interference from WIZN (The Wizard) in Burlington, Vt., which operates on the same frequency. Toward the west, people in Lachute and on the other side of the Ontario border will hear interference from CKQB-FM (106.9 The Bear) in Ottawa.

Though the new signal greatly increases the population served, Dufferin warns that it doesn’t greatly increase the number of anglophones served in that population, since anglos in the area are concentrated around Hudson and Saint-Lazare.

Ready to go

Dufferin tells the CRTC that the Rogers site “is ready made and will allow us to implement the service within weeks of approval as all our other infrastructure and equipment are in place.”

Vice-President Carmela Laurignano confirmed to me that, indeed, the station could be on the air very quickly once this technical plan is approved. She said the tower is ready, the antenna is on stand-by, and programming is ready to go.

Because it was approved only last October, it has until Oct. 19, 2014 to launch, unless it asks for an extension.

Names of on-air talent are “confidential at this point,” Laurignano said, but some of the station’s 25 or so full-time and part-time employees have already been hired.

The station, which will carry the brand “106.7 The Jewel”, part of a network of such stations in southern and eastern Ontario, will air mainly music with an easy listening format (Céline Dion, Rod Stewart, Michael Bublé). Its original application said it would have live programming during peak hours, including local newscasts, but voice-tracked programming outside of those hours. Its budget would be about $750,000 a year, based off mainly local ads that would cost between $22 and $34 a minute on average.

The application can be downloaded as a .zip file here. Comments are being accepted until Sept. 16, and can be submitted online here. Remember that all information submitted, including contact information, appears on the public record. There is no timeline for a decision, but if the CRTC does not find it controversial, expect it within weeks of the deadline for comments.

| TV

CTV Montreal parts with sales manager

Updated below with information from Ecclissi.

Tony Ecclissi gives a presentation about CTV Montreal's fall lineup on June 13. He won't be sticking around to see it on air.

Tony Ecclissi gives a presentation about CTV Montreal’s fall lineup on June 13. He won’t be sticking around to see it on air.

Tony Ecclissi no longer works for CTV Montreal. In what general manager Louis Douville qualified as a “simple re-structuring,” the position of General Sales Manager has been eliminated.

“Martin Poirier will take over the National Sales Manager portfolio and I plan on announcing a Retail Sales Manager in the near future,” Douville wrote to me in an email when I inquired about Ecclissi.

People emailing Ecclissi are now getting an automated reply that reads “Please note that Mr. Antonio Ecclissi is no longer with the company,” followed by contact information for Poirier and Douville, who’s handling local sales for now.

Ecclissi’s LinkedIn page, which has been updated to reflect the end of his three-year tenure at CTV Montreal, lists his profession as “Media Advertising Specialist.”

“There has been some restructuring as you know as a result of the Astral purchase,” Ecclissi told me. “Myself along with the Sales Managers at CTV Ottawa (Dan Champagne) and CTV Vancouver (Lynne Forbes) are the latest casualties who were let go last week. I was General Sales Manager and responsible for both the National Sales Team and the Local sales team.”

Tony Ecclissi

UPDATE (Sept. 4): CTV Montreal has split Ecclissi’s former job in two, naming former TSN 690 GM Wayne Bews as retail sales manager and senior account executive Martin Poirier as national sales manager.

| Media

CBC vs. City in softball game Thursday

Steve Rukavina isn't afraid of City.

Steve Rukavina isn’t afraid of City.

Thursday evening will see an epic media battle for the ages.

Or not.

Staff of City Montreal have accepted a challenge to play a softball game against the CBC Montreal all-stars, who are still recovering from a 10-0 humiliation at the hands of the Jewish General memory clinic last month.

The game begins at 7pm at Nelson Mandela Park in Côte des Neiges, corner of Westbury and Barclay Aves., near the Plamondon metro station.

There’s no money on the line, just pride. They’ll be passing the hat to support the NDG Food Depot.

But the trash talking has already begun

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